# Large-Scale Topological Radar Localization Using Learned Descriptors

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2110.03081 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2110.03081/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 18 of its 27 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 6 Oct 2021.

## Builds on (most cited first, 18 of 18)

- [Batch Normalization: Accelerating Deep Network Training by Reducing Internal Covariate Shift](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1502.03167/) (2015)
- [Feature Pyramid Networks for Object Detection](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1612.03144/) (2016)
- [Random Erasing Data Augmentation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1708.04896/) (2017)
- [NetVLAD: CNN architecture for weakly supervised place recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1511.07247/) (2015)
- [In Defense of the Triplet Loss for Person Re-Identification](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1703.07737/) (2017)
- [ECA-Net: Efficient Channel Attention for Deep Convolutional Neural Networks](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1910.03151/) (2019)
- [Fine-tuning CNN Image Retrieval with No Human Annotation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1711.02512/) (2017)
- [Making Convolutional Networks Shift-Invariant Again](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.11486/) (2019)
- [PointNetVLAD: Deep Point Cloud Based Retrieval for Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1804.03492/) (2018)
- [The Oxford Radar RobotCar Dataset: A Radar Extension to the Oxford RobotCar Dataset](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1909.01300/) (2019)
- [MinkLoc3D: Point Cloud Based Large-Scale Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.04530/) (2020)
- [PCAN: 3D Attention Map Learning Using Contextual Information for Point Cloud Based Retrieval](https://mlsanity.com/paper/1904.09793/) (2019)
- [SOE-Net: A Self-Attention and Orientation Encoding Network for Point Cloud based Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2011.12430/) (2020)
- [DH3D: Deep Hierarchical 3D Descriptors for Robust Large-Scale 6DoF Relocalization](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2007.09217/) (2020)
- [MinkLoc++: Lidar and Monocular Image Fusion for Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2104.05327/) (2021)
- [DiSCO: Differentiable Scan Context with Orientation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2010.10949/) (2020)
- [Kidnapped Radar: Topological Radar Localisation using Rotationally-Invariant Metric Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2001.09438/) (2020)
- [Radar-to-Lidar: Heterogeneous Place Recognition via Joint Learning](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2102.04960/) (2021)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [Open-RadVLAD: Fast and Robust Radar Place Recognition](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2401.15380/) (2024)
- [MinkUNeXt: Point Cloud-based Large-scale Place Recognition using 3D Sparse Convolutions](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2403.07593/) (2024)
- [Automotive mmWave Spinning Radar Place Recognition with Spatially Gated Feature-Correlation Representation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2609.27394/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

In this work, we propose a method for large-scale topological localization based on radar scan images using learned descriptors. We present a simple yet efficient deep network architecture to compute a rotationally invariant discriminative global descriptor from a radar scan image. The performance and generalization ability of the proposed method is experimentally evaluated on two large scale driving datasets: MulRan and Oxford Radar RobotCar. Additionally, we present a comparative evaluation of radar-based and LiDAR-based localization using learned global descriptors. Our code and trained models are publicly available on the project website.